Chorus of disapproval

In the five years that I’ve been The Spectator’s drama critic, one of the nicest afternoons I’ve spent was in the company of my fellow critics. No, not at a matinée, but at a lunch for John Gross, who was retiring as the Sunday Telegraph’s man in the stalls after 16 years. Charles Spencer made a speech in which he quoted Bernard Levin describing John as ‘the nicest man in London’ and, afterwards, John got up and said the thing he’d enjoyed the most about the job was ‘getting to know you lot’.

I’m now retiring myself, but I can’t say that getting to know my colleagues has been the best part of the job. For instance, shortly after my appointment I found myself sitting next to Rhoda Koenig, one of the Independent’s critics, at the Donmar Warehouse. I introduced myself and pointed out that we had a mutual friend in the form of James Wolcott, a Vanity Fair columnist. ‘To quote Dickens,’ she said, ‘we don’t have a mutual friend so much as a friend in common.’

‘Er, what’s the difference?’

‘Look it up in a dictionary. Don’t you get it? I don’t want to talk to you. I’m doing my best to ignore the fact that I’m sitting next to you. I find the fact that you’re doing theatre criticism an ABSOLUTE DISGRACE.’

With that, she got up and moved to another part of the theatre.

Koenig wasn’t alone in her disapproval. Kate Bassett (Independent on Sunday) went on the record to dismiss my early reviews as shockingly ill-informed and Michael Coveney (whatsonstage.com) wrote a bad-tempered piece in Prospect in which he singled me out as representing a lamentable new trend whereby experts like himself were being replaced by amateurs who knew nothing about the theatre.